of course the fps is relevant because it's likely that if the game was running at 30fps on windows then it would run much higher on linux. but yeah, it's definitely going to be where PC needs to go in the future. i would like a separation of general purpose and gaming. heck, it shouldn't even be called "general purpose" because i'm sure you could tweak the steam OS to do general purpose stuff too, just that windows has so much junk now that most don't even need 5% of what it offers.

e.g. i have a netbook from 3 years ago, it has an atom processor...slow as $#@!, 1GB RAM that's not good enough for any windows operating system out there. sure, i can put XP on it but the virtual RAM [cached memory & lack of free memory] kills it. now i have a debian on it, with joe's window manager (probably the lightest windows manager on the face of this earth that has a built-in taskbar and basic functions). i have a wireless program, a volume icon, a power manager and it still only takes up 40MB sitting at boot. if i had a desktop, it would likely be less than 25MBs. how insane is that?

I know steam OS is probably still bloated but it would still be far less bloated than windows 8, that takes up 2GB on my bigger laptop and (about 4GB+ in virtual RAM [cached memory]once you use it enough and don't restart it) and this is after i have tweaked the $#@! out of it and turned off a bunch of services (could even try more but too much work). that's a world of difference in RAM usage and 90%+ of the times, i only use my firefox on my laptop and my netbook. so what's the point of me keeping windows 8? why do i need it?

worst of all? my netbook sometimes outperforms my windows 8 laptop (that i just bought last year). and people wonder why i keep talking about specialized machines/systems. it is equally important to improve the RAM usage than to keep adding RAM, what windows users are used to doing.

all in all, i love linux, that's all i can say. i wanna know how much RAM steam OS uses and what you can do on it.

Last edited by Omar; 01-08-2014 at 01:31.
Reason: virtual memory is page file.

Now that is a very good question indeed, now I'll just need a PC to test it on!

i actually tried to put it on my netbook but it wouldn't boot...the grub was messed up or something.

Originally Posted by keefy

I don't get why people complain about RAM usage, what is the point in having 8 or even 16GB if it never gets used.

because you may not see it but the moment you turn on an app or even if you close off apps or background service after they were on, the RAM doesn't get back to you completely. even if you use a program that frees up RAM for you, you will still eventually need to restart in order to get all of it back.

8GB-16GB Is a lot of RAM but it all depends on how much crap you have on and how many times you reboot your system.

I generally hibernate my system or put it on standby depending on whether it's a desktop, laptop or if i have the power cord on a laptop.

i have to eventually reboot my laptop in order for it to run faster. this is after having my windows 8 run at 0.9GB at boot. when i start, i have about 2.5GB free, not available, available RAM is not as fresh as free.

next time look at your task manager and if you have a windows 8, look at the resource center. you will see what i'm talking about. if you have low free RAM, depending on what sort of PC you have (desktops usually won't have this issue because they're so fast already), you will notice the difference in speed once your free RAM is out.

so having a lot of RAM free, doesn't mean it's useless, because at some point it's being used, otherwise you wouldn't need a pagefile. i haven't tested systems at 8GB or 16GB but i know for sure that depending on what you're doing, your PC will run out of RAM at certain points and start to paging that stuff. for your 8GB PC, that could mean either a resource-heavy game or if you were a 3D art designer.

but windows are bloated pieces of $#@!s and they should start to give us more options (intermediate users) on how to control what windows should run and what it should not. or we can just move to linux. trust me, you will thank valve for doing this. they're saving you $#@!-ton of money and if you intend to stay a PC gamer.

this is going to mean better performance in video games, which will mean less need for high-end equipment.

I leave my PC running for days on end and it doesn't suffer what you say.

well, you must be talking about a desktop, which i understand. my $200 desktop from 2010 doesn't have any issues either. it runs really well too.

you also must have a gaming PC, which is overkill for general purpose. you will start to notice these things once you get a $#@!ty laptop or especially a netbook. or you can test this out on any of your older desktops, preferably pentium 3/4.

keefy, you're practically proving my point when i say that MS is making its users lazy and have accustomed them to fix all problems with throwing more RAM at it.

to make the example more relevant, if the foundation is efficient, and we apply that same ideology when making the OS more robust (which is what valve is about to do, for the most part), you will see that 8GB is A LOT OF RAM and if i had that RAM on my little linux netbook, i could show you ton $#@! more stuff running on that than your gaming PC (of course, things that require RAM, not CPU/GPU lol). my linux PC would be many times more efficient at running program than your PC would because my linux netbook had a far more efficient foundation.

my netbook must be using 2-5% of resources (made up of services) that i don't need. your gaming PC is likely using up 50% or more depending on how well you've maintained it. your computer does not need those processes or services to play games. they're there for other things you may never use and really should not be using on a gaming PC anyway. e.g. you don't need 6 different kinds of print spooler services running, you don't need wireless service running, you don't need remote desktop crap running and i can go through windows and name you dozens more services you don't need as a gamer.

it's more efficient to have a gaming PC that just does gaming and a general purpose PC. this is what valve is trying to do. they are trying to make a gaming PC. you can't do that when windows has a monopoly and has to cater to billions of non-gamers. this is why we need linux. linux is extremely modular and it's far more efficient to begin with.

EDIT: also when i said that i was using an extremely slow CPU, i wasn't saying that it's slow. i was saying that it is "not" slow when i run linux on it but it is extremely slow when i run windows on it. hence the difference is highly visible on a microscopic level so it may not be visible at higher powered PCs but it's there.

just because a company is making profits, doesn't mean that it's doing well. it's how much profits they "could" make is what matters.

so having a lot of RAM free, doesn't mean it's useless, because at some point it's being used, otherwise you wouldn't need a pagefile. i haven't tested systems at 8GB or 16GB but i know for sure that depending on what you're doing, your PC will run out of RAM at certain points and start to paging that stuff. for your 8GB PC, that could mean either a resource-heavy game or if you were a 3D art designer.

This is definitely not the case at all. Stored data is assigned to processes. Unless you have programs running in the background or a memory leak present, then you have nothing to worry about. I have 8GB of RAM and regularly use up to 5-7GB because I often have multiple (some heavy) programs running (games, Photoshop, SAI, Adobe Illustrator, Firefox, Steam, Skype, music... tons of stuff really).

I last turned my computer off back in October. It's not an issue.

Originally Posted by Sufi

but windows are bloated pieces of $#@!s and they should start to give us more options (intermediate users) on how to control what windows should run and what it should not. or we can just move to linux. trust me, you will thank valve for doing this. they're saving you $#@!-ton of money and if you intend to stay a PC gamer.

The way things are going, everything is going free and open source, being put into the hands gamers and coders to play with. I think it would be amazing if Windows followed suit; you'd see dramatic benefits to the OS if this happened. At the very least they could focus on seriously optimizing and streamlining Windows 9 instead of adding stupid n0onsnse like the Metro interface. But I doubt MS ever would.

The only issue with moving to Linux is compatibility of non-Linux games. One beautiful trait of PC gaming is how all of its games are available if you're on Windows. I would hate to lose that.

This is definitely not the case at all. Stored data is assigned to processes. Unless you have programs running in the background or a memory leak present, then you have nothing to worry about. I have 8GB of RAM and regularly use up to 5-7GB because I often have multiple (some heavy) programs running (games, Photoshop, SAI, Adobe Illustrator, Firefox, Steam, Skype, music... tons of stuff really).

I last turned my computer off back in October. It's not an issue.

you're probably right. i haven't used a 8GB system yet so it was my guess. i would try testing out things by using your PC for several things and then going back and forth between various applications. then rebooting and then running some apps again. if you don't notice a difference then 8GB is just more than enough, it's more apparent when you're running on a 1GB system that's like cheap DDR2 RAM.

The way things are going, everything is going free and open source, being put into the hands gamers and coders to play with. I think it would be amazing if Windows followed suit; you'd see dramatic benefits to the OS if this happened. At the very least they could focus on seriously optimizing and streamlining Windows 9 instead of adding stupid n0onsnse like the Metro interface. But I doubt MS ever would.

The only issue with moving to Linux is compatibility of non-Linux games. One beautiful trait of PC gaming is how all of its games are available if you're on Windows. I would hate to lose that.

windows can never compete with linux if and once linux becomes successful in gaming. because windows has to cater to so many out there, they will always be at battle between the non-gamers and the gamers. except non-gamers bring all the money.

expecting MS to create a modular system is asking for a miracle. supposedly, windows 8 is modular but you have no control over it. maybe if they made it modular relevant to gaming, it might work. but expecting that much out of MS would be wishful thinking.

i want linux to be successful so we can get away from windows. it's just not supposed to be for gaming. also linux does most of the stuff people care about anyway. i don't need anything other than a browser and it gives me that so i'm good.

I know Linux is more efficient than windows, lots of people have proved it countless times, I have used it on my PS3 in the past, which had max 256MB RAM plus the video ram with an updated kernal thing.

I was just saying about RAM what does it matter how much is in use as long as you have plenty. Thats all.

Back when ?i had a P4 with 512MB it ran Half life 2 decently but minimising took about 5 seconds and another 5 seconds to maximise back, I followed many guides to remove non essential services to free up RAM but it didn't help, eventually I bought an extra 1024MB of RAM which helped immensely, minimising was almost instant.

windows can never compete with linux if and once linux becomes successful in gaming. because windows has to cater to so many out there, they will always be at battle between the non-gamers and the gamers. except non-gamers bring all the money.

This is true, but I don't think Microsoft is going to sit idly by while gamers move on over to Linux. Microsoft has invested a lot of money into each iteration of Windows solely for gaming and rendering capabilities. It's a market not worth losing. They'll put up some kind of fight by either making their OS more lite or doing some kind of open source work to let the geeks squeeze better performance out of their software.

Whether they succeed or not is the question. Last year Linux users on Steam rose to nearly 2%. That might not seem like much, but it was an exponential growth from the year before. A lot of people are estimating 5-7% this year, then what... 15-20% for 2015? Those numbers will stack up eventually if Microsoft doesn't do better. PC gamers can be fickle and quick to decide about moving on to the next big thing.

Originally Posted by Sufi

wow. yeah, you don't notice this but if you had free RAM there instead of "available", it would be faster. it's all about relativity.

Not really. Available memory is preloaded material (in the case of Windows, it usually being libraries). It's actually faster if you're actively launching and using programs, cutting off wait time in the long run. Programs can do this too, which is why relaunching a game after closing it will sometimes make it start up much faster. The speed difference between emptying available memory sectors and loading them with new data is extremely minimal compared to loading already empty sectors with data. Using modern RAM works well this way because it's stupidly fast compared to loading data from the harddrive when it's actually called by the application.

Your PC is just really slow, and very likely caching data on the harddrive if it only has 1GB of RAM.

I was just saying about RAM what does it matter how much is in use as long as you have plenty. Thats all.

Back when ?i had a P4 with 512MB it ran Half life 2 decently but minimising took about 5 seconds and another 5 seconds to maximise back, I followed many guides to remove non essential services to free up RAM but it didn't help, eventually I bought an extra 1024MB of RAM which helped immensely, minimising was almost instant.

it matters because Windows doesn't give you enough control to remove services you would never need during gaming. if you had this control, you would not have had to buy the upgrade RAM. let's say that you bought it anyway, your PC would still run faster under linux than windows. that's what i'm saying. having more RAM under linux is better than having the same amount under windows.

but your argument is that you could just get an upgrade and have more RAM, which is exactly what i'm talking about. you're losing more money by being a windows user. yeah, you can throw more RAM at it and call it a day but the point is to save money when you don't need to spend it. you're not gaining anything by spending more on RAM that you need to get up to speed anyway.

Originally Posted by Rapture

This is true, but I don't think Microsoft is going to sit idly by while gamers move on over to Linux. Microsoft has invested a lot of money into each iteration of Windows solely for gaming and rendering capabilities. It's a market not worth losing. They'll put up some kind of fight by either making their OS more lite or doing some kind of open source work to let the geeks squeeze better performance out of their software.

Of course, i think they will likely just come out with another iteration of Windows that's just designed for gamers OR they might just have a modular windows in the future OR they might just let you install a specialized version of windows that you could install from the same disc that would essentially be for gamers alone. wishful thinking but if linux takes off, they will definitely do something about it.

Whether they succeed or not is the question. Last year Linux users on Steam rose to nearly 2%. That might not seem like much, but it was an exponential growth from the year before. A lot of people are estimating 5-7% this year, then what... 15-20% for 2015? Those numbers will stack up eventually if Microsoft doesn't do better. PC gamers can be fickle and quick to decide about moving on to the next big thing.

yup, they need a kick in the rear.

Not really. Available memory is preloaded material (in the case of Windows, it usually being libraries). It's actually faster if you're actively launching and using programs, cutting off wait time in the long run. Programs can do this too, which is why relaunching a game after closing it will sometimes make it start up much faster. The speed difference between emptying available memory sectors and loading them with new data is extremely minimal compared to loading already empty sectors with data. Using modern RAM works well this way because it's stupidly fast compared to loading data from the harddrive when it's actually called by the application.

Your PC is just really slow, and very likely caching data on the harddrive if it only has 1GB of RAM.

maybe the new RAMs work better but generally you want to have free memory regardless of recalling data from the RAM, which I agree is faster but you run into issues if you have to literally make the available RAM free and then used for another program that was not already cached. but like you were saying, it's likely not that noticeable due to having so much RAM and having modern ones.

my point was though that while it's not noticeable, it's there. thus it isn't as good as a PC that has free RAM available.

P.S. I tested it, my linux does not cache data. i run at about 400MB cached with firefox running constantly with heavy tasks. it's amazing because when i first bought this netbook, it came loaded with windows 7 starter version. it ran at FULL 1GB (not even talking about cached, it actually took up the entire RAM available) and paged the crap out of my computer. i couldn't even go to google on it. this is why netbooks failed.

then i tried dozens of linux OSes, i was able to run it fairly well but still felt slow at times, i quickly realized it was because while i was not taking up much RAM, the "cached" RAM was causing the slight slow down, it was more apparent on this slow machine. now i'm on a system that runs at (and i just tweaked it in the past hour) 29MB!!! not a joke. this thing will likely never need to page anymore because it never goes above 400MB cached. like i was saying earlier, it sometimes outperforms my laptop that is likely several dozen times faster in specs. efficiency is a huge deal.

I can bet the $499 will be the more popular one. It specs are pretty good.

Yeah I'm sure they will be. Although IBuypower isn't the most well known brand but they make cheap gaming rigs. Not anything amazing but they are mid to low end gaming spec. I'm sure those are popular with people just getting into pc gaming.

maybe the new RAMs work better but generally you want to have free memory regardless of recalling data from the RAM, which I agree is faster but you run into issues if you have to literally make the available RAM free and then used for another program that was not already cached. but like you were saying, it's likely not that noticeable due to having so much RAM and having modern ones.

It's because modern RAM is at least 100,000x faster than any harddrive out there. Even the fastest SSD on the market absolutely pales in comparison. Yes, you'll get a bit of additional latency to clear those sectors for new data, but the difference is so fractionally tiny that it's not worth pulling the data from the HDD when you can instead cache it for quicker access. We're talking a rough difference of microseconds to actual seconds per starting operation in real-world use.

RAM is just so much faster, both in latency (nanoseconds vs milliseconds) and speed (6+GB/s to 200MB/s).

Originally Posted by Sufi

then i tried dozens of linux OSes, i was able to run it fairly well but still felt slow at times, i quickly realized it was because while i was not taking up much RAM, the "cached" RAM was causing the slight slow down, it was more apparent on this slow machine. now i'm on a system that runs at (and i just tweaked it in the past hour) 29MB!!! not a joke. this thing will likely never need to page anymore because it never goes above 400MB cached. like i was saying earlier, it sometimes outperforms my laptop that is likely several dozen times faster in specs. efficiency is a huge deal.

This is because the OS is not finding the 1GB of RAM adequate, and is thus caching over into the harddrive to keep the PC from throwing up on itself and crashing. Keep in mind that harddrives are the biggest burden to the modern PC because they're so damn slow. That's why you're getting these problems. It's an issue of RAM size, not so much how it's used by the OS. It's simply more problematic on Windows as it has a greater overhead than Linux.

It's because modern RAM is at least 100,000x faster than any harddrive out there. Even the fastest SSD on the market absolutely pales in comparison. Yes, you'll get a bit of additional latency to clear those sectors for new data, but the difference is so fractionally tiny that it's not worth pulling the data from the HDD when you can instead cache it for quicker access. We're talking a rough difference of microseconds to actual seconds per starting operation in real-world use.

RAM is just so much faster, both in latency (nanoseconds vs milliseconds) and speed (6+GB/s to 200MB/s).

100,000x you say? lol wow i've been out of the game since 2010, did not realize there had been so many advancements. yeah, i get your point, but you're again looking at it from a point where you wouldn't notice this slight difference.

my point is that the relative difference is still there. you don't notice it because you have more than enough RAM. in the future, once 8GB is out of style and you decided to keep your system for $#@!s/giggles, you may notice more difference since 8GB wouldn't be enough.

point, again being, just because your computer is fast enough, does not mean that we should not care about efficiency because right now you're throwing RAM at it to work well and you'll be in that cycle until you start to care about efficiency from an objective point of view (and i know you do, i'm just trying to make a point about windows). if steam OS was at its finest stage at the moment, you wouldn't need 8GB to have the same speeds you have now. of course, this is taking out the factor that linux just wouldn't be as robust in app support, but we're hoping it goes there with this new direction.

This is because the OS is not finding the 1GB of RAM adequate, and is thus caching over into the harddrive to keep the PC from throwing up on itself and crashing. Keep in mind that harddrives are the biggest burden to the modern PC because they're so damn slow. That's why you're getting these problems. It's an issue of RAM size, not so much how it's used by the OS. It's simply more problematic on Windows as it has a greater overhead than Linux.

yeah, it was caching before, it isn't caching anymore. that's what i meant. because now i have nothing on there that the system does not need in order to run, unless it's something that i need. so by comparison, i was trying to say that any person would've junked it thinking it wasn't going to run well. however, if the OS is efficient, you're saving a lot of resources. so instead of upgrading to 2GB and saying, hey, now it works, i just fix the problem from the core and saved money.

ITs better having more than too little and its best to use it than not to.

Linux is also infinitely more configurable than windows due to it being open source, someone can modify the kernel for their purpose and create a super lightweight OS.
YDL for PS3 someone modified the kernel to use the extra RAM of the GPU so it almost had the full 512MB.

ITs better having more than too little and its best to use it than not to.

and i'm not disagreeing with that. of course, you should always have more. but my point was to show that windows has made us into users that just want to throw RAM at it rather than asking for a more efficient OS.

but yeah, having more isn't bad at all. in fact, if you remember, in the beginning of our discussion, i was actually claiming that it's better to have unused RAM than one that is used up but available.